Square One
Gosh, it feels good to be writing something other than a cover letter.
Sorry. Let me introduce myself. I’m Nat, 28 years old and living near Bristol, UK. And as of October 2025, I’m unemployed.
I realise that’s not uncommon at the moment – according to a recent survey, 4.9% of us Brits over 16 are out of work – but it’s not a position I ever really thought I’d be in. It’s been one of the most chaotic experiences I can remember having, and has brought almost as much to my life as it’s taken away. And that’s why I’ve decided to blog about it.
To give you a bit of background history, I studied a BA in Journalism from 2017 to 2020 (but not before living in an intentional Christian community for a year), then spent four years working on business-focused websites for a company based in London, who were kind enough to let me work from home. The role worked fine at first and scratched my journalist itch just enough, but there came a point where I no longer felt stimulated or challenged in the way I wanted to be. Feeling the need for change, and especially a change from the remote working lifestyle, I applied for jobs sporadically from late 2023 before going much harder at it at the start of 2025.
One of these jobs, a copywriting role at a local catering supplier, got in touch in April to say they were impressed by my application and would I like to come in for an interview. I said yes, had the interview in the first week of May and was offered the role the week after that, with a start date in mid-June. I swapped my previous all-remote team for a group of keen new employees, mostly from the sales and merchandising side of things, and learned how to use my words to sell catering and hospitality products.
For the next few months, everything went well. Though the role was a bit different to anything I’d done in the past, I felt like I was settling into it with few problems. The other new hires and I quickly became friends, and the office culture was just what I needed after four years working alone. Our teammates were all friendly and supportive, even if our hybrid working model meant some of us only saw each other in person infrequently. It was as good a start to a new job as I could’ve asked for. There was no indication that anything was about to go wrong…
Then one Monday morning in October, us younglings were called into a meeting at about 10:30 and emerged maybe half an hour later with our hearts and dreams shattered. Basically, the parent company had decided that in order to improve our business’ underwhelming performance, we were all being let go with immediate effect, along with about 20 other employees. The words “generative AI” were used, and they haven’t sounded the same to my ears since. I remember us staring around the table at each other in silence, our two line managers visibly shaken by what they’d had to tell us, the room full of the thickest atmosphere I’ve ever experienced in a meeting.
The months since then have been a blur. I’ve submitted job applications numbering well into triple figures. Endured weeks of silence from would-be employers. Seen the words “Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward with your application” enough times that they’ve started appearing in my dreams (nightmares?). There have been days when all I’ve wanted to do was cry. Or drink. Or both. And although there is reason to believe things are getting better – I recently had three interviews in the space of five days, and am starting to notice more local vacancies that sound like my thing – there’s still no way of knowing when it’s all going to end.
If I haven’t already made the point, it’s been an upside-down, emotionally intense period of my life. But you know what I do during those times? I write. Writing has always been my way of making sense of life when it won’t make sense of itself, which is exactly what’s happening at the moment – and so here we are.
This isn’t my first stab at blogging – I’ve been doing it on and off since my late teens, but mostly off for the past few years as work and other commitments took up more of my time. It will, however, be a lot more personal than any blog I’ve had in the past, since it’s focusing squarely on this particular time in my life. It’s also my first venture into Substack, which is pretty exciting.
One thing this blog won’t be is a place of constant negativity. I could bark at length about the sorry state of the job market and what a silly decision it was to just lay us all off without warning and how it feels like my career is terminally screwed, but for what? There are dozens of forum threads full of those sentiments and they’ve done nothing to change the situation, so the last thing I want is to be part of that racket. To borrow a line from Switchfoot: if I’m adding to the noise, turn off this song.
Don’t get me wrong, unemployment has truly been a crappy experience and has genuinely felt hopeless at times. But I don’t really want that to be the vibe of this blog. I want to be honest, sure, but that will also mean sharing the lessons I’ve learned, the things I’ve been made to reflect on, and – dare I say it – the good things that have come from this time. I know I deserve better than the situation I’m in (and if you’re a fellow jobseeker reading this, so do you), but that doesn’t mean there’s been nothing to gain from it all.
I’d also like this blog to be somewhere you, dear reader, can feel at home and find a place. The writers who have inspired me the most – Nadia Bolz-Weber, Rachel Held Evans, Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr to give you just a few – have always used their words to create space for others, and that’s what I intend to do here. That might be harder when so much of what I’m writing is about me and my experiences, but hopefully there’ll be something in here that speaks into an area of your life, whether that’s jobs-related or something else entirely.
I’ve named this thing ‘Postcards from the Desert’ because that’s the best image I can use for how these past seven months have felt. It’s common for us Christians to reach for the desert (or wilderness) metaphor when talking about hard times, or times when God has felt distant – this comes from the Israelites spending 40 years wandering the dry lands, and Jesus later doing the same for a more modest 40 days. The thing with both those experiences is that they were transformative for those who went through them, often teaching lessons that needed to be learned. That’s exactly how my time of unemployment has been; I’m not the same person I was before that one October morning, and it feels worth sharing a bit about why that is.
While I’m not giving up the job search (my mama didn’t raise quitters), I’m also not too naïve to realise that it might be a while before it’s over. Until that day comes, this big part of my life will continue to feel out of joint, so I’ll deal with that the only way I know how – by putting it into words. So fasten those seatbelts and text your loved ones, because I think this could be quite the ride…